John Lucas

I work with words.

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Vancouver-based writer and editor driven by a passion for telling a good story and inspiring others.

  • 20BC: Follow Me on Tumblr

    SFU by Arthur Erickson

    So, I started a Tumblr blog. Or Tumblr page. Or “a Tumblr”. Whatever you want to call it. I was inspired to make its focus on B.C. art, design, and architecture of the 20th century. Or at least the stuff I like. (The emphasis will probably be on the second half of that century, but there might be exceptions.) If that interests you, feel free to follow me at 20bc.tumblr.com. I promise to update it more often than I update this blog (which isn’t saying much, I realize).

    To get the ball rolling, I reblogged some photos of the Simon Fraser University Burnaby campus, designed by Arthur Erickson for Erickson-Massey Architects.

    Giving credit where it’s due, I am using the Expo 86 logo as an avatar. That was designed by Frank Mayrs and Ian MacLeod.

  • The Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver 2014

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    This week the Georgia Straight celebrates some of the coolest things in the city with its annual Best of Vancouver issue. I have some content in there, including an item on Vancouver’s most disgustingly beautiful piece of public art. (Can you guess which one I mean?)

    As part of the Best of Bands feature, I shine the spotlight on local acts Tough Age and Young Liars. Huge thanks to everyone who made this feature possible, including all the writers and bands, and especially Straight music editor Mike Usinger and photographers Rebecca Blissett and Emily Cooper. Stellar work, everyone.

  • Orijit Sen

    Orijit-Sens-mural
    For last week’s Georgia Straight, I interview Indian graphic artist and comics creator Orijit Sen. We talked about his massive mural in the Punjab, a scaled-down version of which he has brought to Vancouver for the Indian Summer festival. We also discussed his first graphic novel, River of Stories, published in 1994.

    Like the fictional journalist at the centre of River of Stories, Sen found himself drawn to the antidevelopment side as he learned more about what was at stake. “Although I tried to give a sense of the arguments the movement was trying to put forward in a kind of rational sense,” he says, “in fact the main character goes from being this person who doesn’t know too much about it, who’s going in as a journalist to report, and who becomes a fervent supporter of it. So it’s the same journey that happened to me personally as well.”

    Thanks to some friends involved with an environmental NGO, Sen was the recipient of a grant that allowed him to publish River of Stories. In a delicious bit of poetic justice, the money came from the same government that he was now actively protesting against. “But you know how sometimes the government is: the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” he says, clearly relishing the irony. “They were supposedly giving money to this NGO to produce environmental literature for young people—so, basically, stuff about trees, plants—obviously assuming that it’s all politically safe stuff.”

    Read the full article here.

    You can read River of Stories in its entirety here.

    If you happen to be in Vancouver, Orijit Sen will be part of a panel discussion called Artpolitik at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts this evening (July 9) at 6 p.m. At 4 p.m., he’ll give a free talk on the scaled-down version of his Punjab mural in the Woodward’s Atrium, where the piece is on display until July 13. See the Indian Summer Festival website for details.

  • Tame Impala

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    Just revisiting another of the stories I wrote for Concrete Skateboarding. Click here to read my article about Australian psych-rock wizard Kevin Parker and his musical project Tame Impala.

    Impressively, Lonerism certainly sounds like the product of a group of people. It’s all Parker, though, and while the Fab Four vocal harmonies and acid-washed guitar licks of songs like “Mind Mischief” and “Apocalypse Dreams” suggest he hasn’t lost his taste for paisley-skies psychedelia, there are plenty of elements that set this LP apart from its predecessor. Foremost among these is Parker’s ample use of keyboards, adding layers of pastel-wash synth tones to tracks like “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” and “She Just Won’t Believe Me”.

    “I was just feeling like looking to other things to get new crazy sounds,” he explains. “I’m always trying to find the craziest sound, you know—the thing that sounds the least like it comes from Earth. It’s really difficult to do that with guitars, because whatever you do with a guitar, it’s usually going to end up sounding like a guitar. It’s going to have that kind of earthy, rock ’n’ roll feel. But with synthesizers, they just start in a completely different place. It was just really kind of exciting to have this whole new playing field of sounds and emotions.”

  • Chelsea Wolfe

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    For this week’s Georgia Straight, I interviewed Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe about her most recent album, Pain Is Beauty, and her film project, “Lone”. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

    “A lot of the album was inspired by natural disasters, and the way we think we have our lives under control, but in a second the forces of nature could take that all away from us,” Wolfe explains. “I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s reality for a lot of people in the world. Things like that happen every day. I definitely think that those two things were indicative of wanting to be able to move forward but having to overcome things that come into your life unexpectedly.”

    Read the full article on the Straight’s website.

  • Farewell to Concrete

    Japandroids
    A fun freelance gig I’ve had for the past couple of years has been writing the Sound Check column for Concrete Skateboarding magazine. Sadly, Concrete has decided to stop covering music, and so Sound Check is no more.

    I have decided to post a few of the article I wrote for Concrete, starting with this one on Vancouver’s own rock ‘n’ roll power duo Japandroids.

  • Eagulls


    For this week’s Georgia Straight, I interviewed English postpunk act Eagulls about convincing their reluctant singer to join them, and their resemblance (or lack thereof) to a certain American band. Read it here, and check out some of the group’s video’s below.

  • Google and “the right to be forgotten”

    Google

    Earlier this week, the European Court of Justice held that  Spanish lawyer’s “right to be forgotten” was violated when Google refused to eliminate links to embarrassing articles about him in its search results. In this interesting take on the case and its implications, Slate’s Eric Posner says the ruling is “perfectly sensible”, noting that it shows that “America is rigidly ideological about free speech, while Europe is pragmatic and flexible.”

    It’s hard to imagine a “right to be forgotten” in the United States. The First Amendment will protect Google, or any other company, that resurfaces or publishes information that’s already public. This is especially true of official records, like a property auction, but also applies to pretty much anything that has not been found by a court to be defamatory. By contrast, the right to be forgotten allows courts to balance the public’s interest in knowing this information against the ordinary person’s right to be left alone.

  • My other blog: Get Evolved!

    About a year ago I started a blog called Get Evolved! Rather ambitiously, I thought that blogging about issues such as the environment and veganism was a great idea. Well, I still think that’s a great idea, but I have come to realize that keeping a blog up to date actually takes more time than I had available. Nonetheless, that blog is still there, and I will update it periodically. (And more often than “periodically” if there is a sudden spike in interest.)

    I took that photo of the trees myself, incidentally. Kinda reminds me of Endor.

  • Die Antwoord

    One of my favourite articles to write in recent years was this Georgia Straight cover feature on South African rap act Die Antwoord. It’s not that the group was a great interview—it was actually tricky getting decent answers out of Ninja and Yo-Landi—but writing the story gave me the opportunity to research an area of global pop culture that was quite literally foreign to me.

    You can read the full article here, but here’s an excerpt:

    As a condition of interviewing Die Antwoord, all reporters are instructed to visit the group’s website and watch a video titled “Straight From the Horse’s Piel”. In addition to offering a flash of Ninja’s tattooed penis, the eight-minute mini documentary purports to answer the above questions, and then some. Like everything else Die Antwoord does, though, it really seems designed to make you wonder what the hell you have just witnessed, with Ninja’s obfuscations taking viewers further down the rabbit hole. Addressing the band’s much-discussed authenticity, for example, the lanky rapper offers the following: “It’s actually a deep question, that question, you know. ’Cause the only real things in life is the unexpected things. Everything else is just an illusion.”

    By that yardstick, Die Antwoord is as real as they come. No one outside of South Africa—and few outside of Cape Town, for that matter—knew of the group before February 1 of this year. That was the day Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin posted the videos for “Zef Side” (aka “Beat Boy”) and “Enter the Ninja” to the popular U.S.–based blog. Both clips instantly went viral, with the latter racking up more than 7.6 million YouTube views to date, thanks in large part to its off-the-chart WTF quotient. It’s a safe bet that no one watching the “Enter the Ninja” video had ever seen anything like it before. While Ninja spits head-spinning rhymes about decapitating haters, Vi$$er does a Lolita routine in a bedroom plastered with pictures of her bandmate and crawling with rats. While she lip-synchs the song’s helium-voiced hook, she changes out of what looks like a school uniform and into an oversized T-shirt that hangs off of one shoulder.

    “Enter the Ninja” is striking enough on a musical level, its melodramatic, synth-swept beat topped by Ninja’s rapid-fire flow of English peppered with Afrikaans slang. But it was probably the physical appearance of Die Antwoord’s frontpersons that seemed so foreign to a North American audience accustomed to picture-perfect pop stars. Impossibly long and lean, and covered with what look like homemade tattoos, Ninja is menacing in a comic-book-villain sort of way, while Vi$$er’s petite frame and postlobotomy mullet give her the look of a Skipper doll whose platinum locks have been attacked by a toddler armed with a pair of scissors and a malevolent streak.…If Die Antwoord shocked North America, the feeling was mutual.